Internet radio and music events: the new normal?

It appears that if you are organizing a music event, a festival, or concert of some kind, a linkup with an Internet radio station or music social media application is a must.

We at Radio Survivor get all kinds of notices about these arrangements. For example, the online radio platform Radionomy tells us that it will serve as the “official streaming radio partner” for the Riot Fest music festival, which will tour Chicago, Denver, and Toronto in late August and September. Radionomy allows users to create their own radio stations and keep them for free, provided the channel has reached a certain audience level. The less ambitious just listen to the many Radionomy stations already launched.

Radionomy will provide uniquely curated sets for the riot concerts, the company says, focusing on headliner bands plus remixes of tunes first performed by the participants. Pandora has been doing this for a while, of course—dropping by festivals, creating special channels, interviewing musicians on YouTube and that sort of thing. Ditto for Slacker radio and Turntable.fm. The latter service accompanies all kinds of parties, raves, events, you name it.

But lots of individual Internet deejays are also getting into the act. My esteemed friend Sir Ernest Crackleton, streaming and podcasting purveyor of pre-1951 recordings, has constructed a playlist in honor of the 115th anniversary of Guglielmo Marconi’s wireless coverage of the Kingstown Regatta of 1898. The hallowed date will be noted by Dublin, Ireland’s Ye Olde Hurdy Gurdy Museum of Vintage Radio, in tandem with the Martime Museum of Kingstown, on July 20 and 21.

Sir Ernest offers his Crackleton Manor program on Radioactive International, an internet streaming site that takes inspiration (in Radioactive’s words) from “the pioneers of Free Radio like James Connolly who used morse code in the 1916 Easter rising and Ronan O’Rahilly who started Radio Caroline because the BBC wouldn’t play his band because they were black.”

The virtue of these services, compared to AM/FM radio, is that they are much more flexible and extendable to any kind of gathering almost anywhere. And, of course, they let people who aren’t physically attending your event get a real audio taste of what’s going on.

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About Matthew Lasar

Matthew Lasar is a co-founder of Radio Survivor and its business manager. He is the author of Radio 2.0: Uploading the First Broadcast Medium (http://tinyurl.com/jr8uknk) and teaches history at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Likes: deejays, classical music, Disco, postpunk, cats, free school lunches. Dislikes: money, ideologies, claims that technology will fix everything. Follow him on twitter at @matthewlasar.